Do you have 5,000 friends? Facebook doubts it

Shannon Bowman, a 27-year-old culinary student from Dania Beach, has 124 friends listed on Facebook, and she says that's plenty.

Chloe Dolandis, a 23-year-old musician from Boca Raton, has more than 1,500 friends listed and says she's ready for many more.

How many friends are enough, and who among them should get access to all one's personal information and pictures? That's the debate raging among users of Facebook, the online social network that started out five years ago for college students and has since expanded to parents and grandparents.

For Bowman, the answer is simple: "It has to be someone I know in real life or know so well from somewhere else."

That's what Facebook administrators say they had in mind when they imposed a cap of 5,000 friends.

But thousands of others say 5,000 is not enough. They formed online groups to protest a limit they say is unfair because they use the site to market themselves as well as for social connections.

In the online world, friends are anyone allowed access to your social network profile, which can include personal photos, videos and status updates on what you had for lunch. With 175 million members around the world, it can be easy to amass large numbers of people asking to be your friends, even if they have never met you.

Those who want huge numbers of such friends are collecting people as a game, said Bernie Hogan, a social networking researcher at the University of Oxford in England. In general, people cannot have more than 100 to 150 active relationships, he said.

"There's only so much time in the day to sustain emotionally rewarding relationships," Hogan said. Overdo it, and that leads to individuals suffering to what he described as "social information overload."

"They get on a site and aggregate a number of friends, collect a bunch and realize there's too much information on a day-to-day basis to adequately keep up with them," Hogan said.

That leads to a tipping point.

"Most of the time, instead of being careful and whittling down the friends, a lot of people will simply get rid of their network on their site, start fresh or move on to another social networking site," Hogan said.

Who exactly is a friend? The standards are different for online and offline relationships.

Dean Bairaktaris, 36, a Web designer in Fort Lauderdale, has more than 300 friends on Facebook, several of whom he has never met.

He says he accepts anyone who wants to connect as long as they are not spammers.

"I don't want to be elitist or snooty," he said. "If you're on Facebook or Twitter, you're there to be social. It doesn't make sense not to be."

Dolandis signed up for Facebook in 2006 after she got fed up with too many strangers trying to meet her on MySpace, an alternate social networking site that started out for band promotion and young adults. She wanted to start over and liked Facebook's stricter sense of privacy.

Still, she said, most of the friends listed on her Facebook page are acquaintances, not friends.

"I'm a musician, so adding more people is going to be great marketing for me," she said.

Even so, she has 24 friend requests pending that she hasn't made up her mind about. She's had privacy issues in the past and had friend requests from strangers along with messages hitting on her.

"People can be so creepy! Leave me alone," she said.

She doesn't list her personal phone number, address or e-mail on her page.

Dolandis said her next step is to figure out the privacy settings on Facebook. Users can customize which friends are allowed to see which information in their profile, sort of mirroring offline relationships.

At a bar, we behave differently than we do at the workplace, Hogan said. Online, people have multiple identities that reflect their multiple identities offline.

"The idea that online life should be separate from offline life kind of assumes we have one way we behave offline, which isn't true," Hogan said.

A person's personality is flexible and plastic, he said.

"It is contextual. Your identity is tied to the room or environment you find yourself in. The challenge with online is there's no definite sense of context."

Have a friend who barely touches or updates Facebook? Take a look at the person's friend feed and you might see a dearth of activity, he said.

Know someone on Facebook who over-shares? Take a glimpse at that person's friend feed and you might see the majority of his or her friends have created list after list of 25 random facts.

"What's funny is that people used to think the big part of the Internet was isolation," Hogan said. "Now the problem is the opposite. We're overloaded with social information. Too much to do with it."